The Power of Experiential Learning:

Experiential Engagement Therapy

At The Exclusive Hawaii, Experiential Engagement Therapy is designed to make use of the way the human nervous system is wired to learn. Experience-based therapy is retained more than traditional-style therapy, where you sit and receive information or advice passively. Experiential Engagement Therapy is learning about yourself, your emotions, your beliefs, and your addictions by engaging fully in your experience – not just thinking, but doing!

Humans learn best through experience. As an ancient Chinese proverb eloquently and succinctly notes: “What I hear, I forget; what I see, I remember; what I do, I understand.”

Managing Triggers in Recovery

After completing treatment, many people want to totally avoid triggers in their life. If they’re not triggered, they won’t want to drink or use or purge or whatever it may be. However, the fact is – you’re going to get triggered. Life has a way of always throwing some hurdle at us. The defining aspect of your treatment is for you to know how to handle those triggers, and respond in a calm, regulated way – even if it’s a life-threatening situation.

Cognitive Learning

VS

Experiential Learning

Today, biologists and neuropsychologists argue that humans are “hardwired” to learn by doing. It has been estimated that while we remember only 20% of what we hear and 50% of what we see, that we retain fully 80% of what we do.

To picture this more clearly, think about learning to ride a bike. Which are you going to remember more: reading a book on how to ride a bicycle – or actually getting on the seat and riding down the sidewalk?

Experiential Engagement Therapy (EET) requires your full engagement and participation in experiencing your emotions, past trauma, and unresolved pain. With Experiential Engagement Therapy, you will learn how to feel and learn from the discomfort and anxiety that arises in your physical body. You will learn to walk through the discomfort and physical pain. In this uncomfortable place, you will find the deepest understanding of yourself, your belief systems, your addictions, your depression, and your anxiety.

True freedom and deep safety exists if you are willing to take a risk to go into the experience of pain, sadness and discomfort itself, to allow our team of experienced and compassionate professionals to guide you to resolution and release from the grasp of addiction. If we teach you how to navigate these emotions only cognitively, there will be a limit to how much you will retain. You’ll be missing the most important part — which is you facing the emotional pain in order to learn how to navigate it.

``In avoiding our sadness we avoid our lives. Learning from our sadness can bear great fruit, and avoiding it can have hidden costs. Our choice is between feeling the sharp pains of self-discovery or enduring the dull ache of unconsciousness that will last for the rest of our lives``

- Marianne Williamson

The Mind-Body Connection

What we teach with Experiential Engagement Therapy happens at a body level. It is a very specific kind of bioenergetic body psychotherapy, where there is an irrefutable mind-body connection. It is taking the world of the body and the world of the mind and correlating each with the other. With bioenergetic analysis, you will allow yourself to fully experience and feel the sensations and discomfort that emotions and beliefs bring in your physical body. You will observe how you are triggered by past experiences that are lodged in your physical body, your emotional body, and your psyche.

With Experiential Engagement Therapy, clients discover that just talking about feelings is not enough. In other words, we cannot just do cognitive (in your head) therapy, because it will stay cognitive forever. The power of transformation lies in moving into experiencing and feeling all of your feelings without repression. Freeing changes happen when we allow ourselves to create true safety and have the bioenergetic experience. Once that happens, you will learn to follow the experience to your belief system. Once you are in the body, you are riding the bicycle.

Experiential Therapy to Cultivate Passion & Fun

One of the things that we do not do enough of, especially in the Western world, is spend time in our right brain. Most of us may even feel uncomfortable when not focusing on intellectual, linear, logical thinking. At The Exclusive Hawaii, we purposely design and incorporate experiential therapies to provide you the opportunity to engage the right hemisphere of your brain, where emotional, intuitive and creative healing takes place.

Why do we want you to access the right brain in addiction recovery and for any other mental health challenges? Research shows that play, meditation, and artistic pursuits relieve stress, improve brain function, stimulate the mind and boost creativity, and improve relationships. It even helps a person feel younger and more energetic. In our program, we also understand that counseling effectively requires the integration of both right- and left-brain processing.

Children are a perfect examples of all-in engagement with their right brains. They don’t analyze anything. They just launch into every experience with curiosity. Experiential therapies are about entering and having experiences without over-analyzing them. Through the willingness to fully engage, you will begin to transform yourself into a happier, more alive participant in living the life you have dreamed of living.

Contact The Exclusive Hawaii Today for a Confidential Conversation.808-775-0200 Call or fill out the form below.